Elements of a U.S. Strategy Toward Afghanistan

I. The United States has four fundamental objectives in its involvement in Afghan
affairs:

The first objective is the creation of a stable, reasonably secure and
peaceful state so that withdrawal will not constitute a base for anti-
American activities;

The second objective is to end as rapidly as feasible the enormous drain
on American resources now being expended in the Afghan conflict;
The third objective is to prevent a “blow back” of the Afghan conflict
that might constitute or appear to constitute a major failure and so
encourage anti-American actions in other, particularly Islamic, areas; and
The fourth objective is to prevent contamination of American
institutions and laws by activities begun in Afghanistan including the
effects of large-scale money laundering and the destabilizing of the
American system of law, justice and opposition to torture.

II. Accomplishment of these objectives is obviously a complex project, involving
as it does actions not only in Afghanistan but in neighboring regions and indeed even
more broadly.

But steps toward accomplishment of it can and must be undertaken as
rapidly as feasible. Moreover, accomplishment depends in part on the actions and/or
inactions of others although to a degree they can be influenced by American policies
and programs.

III. The first step toward accomplishment of the objectives is a realistic
evaluation of the current situation, trends, assets and weaknesses not only in
Afghanistan but also in neighboring Pakistan, India, Iran the Central Asian republics.

Here I will discuss only those of Afghanistan, but the others must be borne in mind;
and the capacities of the United States and its NATO allies to affect developments in
these areas must be considered.

1) in Afghanistan the situation is neither all black nor all white:
On the positive side:

a) Although severely weakened by decades of occupation and civil
war, Afghanistan does have an impressive “social contract,” that is to say, a general
consensus on relationships among the citizens, without which no society can function.
Most of Afghanistan’s 22,000 or so villages adjudicate local
affairs through gatherings known (according to the area) as jirga, shuras or ulus.
These gatherings are not, in the American sense of the word, institutions but
“occasions.” They are evoked when some pressing issue cannot be resolved by a local
headman or a respected religious figure or when two or more families disagree.
These groups, which closely resemble centuries-old American Algonquin Indian
procedures, are the closest thing Afghanistan has to participatory democracy.

While the typical Afghan village is autonomous, village councils
form the lowest layer of a sort of pyramid of “legitimation.” Above them districts
and tribes also form assemblies and these in turn feed into an over-arching national
“occasion” known as a loya jirga. The loya jirga does not come into being by election
and is not a governing body. Rather, it might be roughly compared to the assembly
that drafted the American Constitution. It is an gathering of people respected in
their communities, selected by consensus rather than election. Its task is to set out
a general direction of policy.

b) Afghanistan is not the formless collection of warring tribes the
British and the Russians thought it to be. It has three overlapping sets of belief or
custom that give it the toughness of character that ultimately defeated both the
British and the Russians. The first of these is religion. While the country is divided
between the two major sects of Islam, Sunnism and Shiism, its people uniformly
regard themselves as Muslim. As believed and practiced, Islam in Afghanistan is
distinctive; it is tempered by pre- or non-Islamic custom which, in the Pashtun areas
is known as the Pashtunwali but in its essentials spans the country. So a sense of the
“way” -- of what is right and proper -- is the second element binding the country
together despite vast distances and severe geographical inhibitions to movement.
The third shared belief is that the country and all of its inhabitants have been
grievously harmed, generation after generation, by foreigners. This sense of injury
has united them in what to us appears xenophobia but to them is the basis of
nationalism. While this appears, and under the current circumstances, is an
inhibition to American actions, it offers a positive element for the future of the
country.

c) There does seem to be a genuine dislike, indeed fear, of the
Taliban even in Pashtun areas and certainly is evident in the areas of the other
minorities. How much this is tempered by respect for the Taliban as the only
effective native force is debatable. There has been considerable progress in the
creation of Afghan security forces. Kabul city is today almost completely “secured”
(at least against the Taliban) by Afghan police, at the cost, obviously, of turning the
city into a collection of fortresses and the streets into an endless array of check
points. But, Afghanistan is a country of villages and the war is a rural war. The writ
of the government does not run widely outside of Kabul even in non Taliban areas.

William R. Polk served as an advisor to President John F. Kennedy and later became a professor of history at the University of Chicago, where he established the Center for Eastern Studies.
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William R. Polk served in President John F. Kennedy's administration, where he was the member of the Policy Planning Council responsible for much of the Islamic world, including Afghanistan. He later became professor of history at the University of Chicago and president of the Adlai Stevenson Institute of International Affairs. He is the author of 17 books including Understanding Iraq, Violent Politics and Understanding Iran. He is now at work on a book on Afghanistan to be entitled The Cockpit of Asia. His website is www.williampolk.com.